Up and at ’em this morning. We planned to walk out to town via the blue route and return by the yellow. Blue route turned out to be a terrifying descent into the bottom of the valley, with no doubt a terrifying climb up into town thereafter. It was absolutely fabulous out there in the wild in perfect quiet, save the distant call of a lone eagle. Given my recent fall, ankle strapping and consequent limited mobility, I was (to put it plainly) scared shitless, and so we returned to base and walked out via yellow route instead. I was really disappointed that we could not continue as it had been beautiful indeed.
Yellow route began nicely, with a crossing of the railway followed by a steady incline via a forest track.
The route left the track, went back downhill and cut through olive groves and vineyards. It was very pleasant in the early sun, with frost still on the ground – and the views were lovely.
My camera gave up on me in the first olive grove. Was I mad? You bet, because… /the views were lovely/. I could have taken some great panoramas.
Our path turned upward again and crossed some heavy clay and cut across frightening precipices. I was quite literally hanging on to juniper and rosemary bushes in order to prevent a fall. The views were amazing and … my camera wasn’t working!
It was at about this point when we had a close encounter with the eagles. I was trying to clean my sasquatch feet off when I heard Mr Snail exclaiming. I looked up and we had eight eagles close and overhead. AND MY BLOODY CAMERA WASN’T WORKING!!!!!
Argh!
The path improved as we moved on and approached town. We reached an unsurfaced road and I was not at all surprised to find that it was the track that we had set off on at the start of the yellow route. We could easily have missed out the difficult and scary parts. If we had, we might not have seen the eagles and failed to realise one of my lifelong ambitions so, you know, not all bad.
Anyway, we decided to return down the track and not to bother going into town. We were becoming hungry and the restaurant on site here has a good reputation…
We arrived back a little after midday and found that the "restaurant closed today sign" that had been there yesterday was still on display. I enquired at reception. Yes, the restaurant is open… tonight. They don’t open until 8pm. I was starving after my exercise.
I made risotto in the van.
We are taking Dusty out for a walk now. I will try to rescue some photos from this morning on our return (seeing as we won’t be going out for dinner).
